6/5/92 (JP Anniversary Supplement)

The Little Stories

Lurking beneath the historic headlines are the "real" stories - about telephones, eggs and a Foreign Ministry that once had nothing to say.

By: Sam Orbaum

The banner headline of May 16, 1948, was hardly news to me: "STATE OF ISRAEL IS BORN." I turned a few pages and found what I was looking for a few days later: a 35-word item declaring that Moshe Sharett, the foreign minister, had decided the citizens of this new nation would not be termed "Israelites."
    The search was on: I had to read more than 12,000 issues of this newspaper - probably over 100,000 pages of very busy newsprint - gathering, copying, selecting, editing and displaying the most amusing, bizarre and poignant "little stories" lurking beneath the historic headlines. Almost a year later, The Jerusalem Post published the results in a book titled Never A Dull Moment, on the occasion of Israel's 40th anniversary.
    Page after page, I ignored the sensational triumphs and tragedies, the wars and peace treaties, to weed out the real stuff: the story of the Belgian explorers who sent a cable from the South Pole expressing their appreciation for Telma Soup. Man walked on the Moon; yes, of course. But the world deserves to know that, at about the same time, Israel was just as excited by this shrieking headline: "Top hats and mustard to be cheaper."
    The task was an exercise in forecasting the past. The April 1972 headline "Tal says war likely in 1972" was interesting: notwithstanding the proclamation by the head of the armored command, there was to be no war that year. Almost exactly a year later, though, came this: "Aluf Tal: Less danger of all-out war in 1973." The Jerusalem Post's own experts were no better: On October 3, 1973, a Post editorial headlined "False alarm" assured us all that there would be no full-scale war. Pooh, pooh, we said ... The Yom Kippur War began three days later.
    On September 14, 1948, a small item said that "Count [Folke] Bernadotte has outlived his usefulness as a mediator in his effort to achieve ... peace in the Middle East, said the New York Post in an editorial." The article was eerily prophetic: three days later, Bernadotte was murdered in Jerusalem.
    On June 2, 1967, a Jerusalem jewelry shop placed an ad saying that "The gates of the holy city will really open before you, when you visit the Tarshish shop." A lot of people must have visited the shop: on June 7, the IDF broke through the gates of the Old City.
    How did other predictions fare? Consider these pronouncements uttered somewhere at the far end of a limb: "Knesset agrees with B-G: 'Who is a Jew?' dead issue" (1959); "500,000 Soviet Jews said ready to leave for Israel" (1957); "Nearly ready to fly to Moon" (1949); "Top Nazi killer, Eichmann, reported living in Kuwait" (1959); "A phone for every settlement [by the end of this year]" (1956); "Phone subscribers' millennium in only four to five years" (1960); "A phone for everyone who wants it - in 3 years" (1966); "Only half who want phones will get them" (1979).
    Or these: "Syria, Israel reaffirm pledge to refrain from all hostile action" (early 1967); "[Yigal] Allon calls for settlement on new territories" (1967); "US Betar group wants to settle on Western Bank" (June 9, 1967); "Gaddafi: Israel will win new war" (April 1973); "Tel Aviv's white elephant [Central Bus Station]" (1975); "Sadat sees signs for accord in '77" (1977); "Assad: Peace unlikely this year" (1977); "Carter says Begin won't stall peace" (1977); "Begin: Won't sign agreement that would harm Yamit villages" (1978); "Egyptians say they'll rebuild Yamit and name it 'Sadat' " (1982); "Sadat: 'I have lived longer than necessary' " (1981); "90% inflation seen if trend continues" (1979); "Yigael Hurvitz warns of 1,000% annual inflation" (1984); "Bruno predicts inflation will be down to 10% in '88" (1987).
    The most resoundingly anachronistic statement was published well before the era covered by Never A Dull Moment, the work of an unknown advertising copywriter. "THE EVENT OF THE WEEK," the ad rang out: "MASPERO offers you A NEW CIGARETTE - look out for further announcements." Some event; some week: unfortunately, this great event was overshadowed by the fact that World War II began the day before.
    Speed-reading through a nation's existence provides a fast-forward view of developments. Trends become noticeable in hours of perusal rather than years of real-time reading in which you can only see one day's progress per day.
    In this breathtaking time-warp, the Six Day War is a two-minute flit.
    Compressed news-reading gives unusual perspectives on Israel. Eggs used to be a national obsession. Egg shortages, egg rations, egg prices, egg bureaucracy, egg crime. Even the world's largest egg. More so, the telephone: every few years was another item promising everyone would get a telephone within three years, in five years, soon, any day. One peculiar story in 1960 promised that people who already have phones will "have no cause for complaints in just another four or five years" - when the technicians will be able to start attending to breakdowns.
    There have been the evergreen obsessions: the Holocaust, aliya, war and peace, terrorism. Religion and politics, separately and together. There were transitional obsessions: food in the early '50s, Eichmann in the early '60s, invincibility in the late '60s, vulnerability soon after, Palestinians ever since.
    But that's all Page 1 stuff. Read on: inside those dozen thousand editions of this newspaper are the signposts of our wonderful manic-depressive, lovable-hatable character.
National ego is a neurosis that fills the newspaper: we so desperately want to be liked. We can't decide if we want to be A Nation Like All Others or a Light Unto The Nations, but, we are neither: instead, we have in us a little of each nation, and have for the most part failed to be a light even unto ourselves.
    What they say about us, who salutes us and who denigrates us, is of supreme interest. In 1948, with our very existence uncertain, we were buoyed to read that boxing hero Jack Dempsey donated blood for Israel. We read in 1949 of George Bernard Shaw's Tel Aviv pen pal ("Seek younger friends, I am extinct," he wrote to 20-year-old Elise Deutsch, after a four-year correspondence).
    The famous who love us: it's a popular theme. Actor Edward G. Robinson visited in 1950. One day he stopped by a ma'abara (transit camp) of Yemenite Jews where he was besieged by children proffering bits of paper. He thought, naturally, that they wanted his autograph. On the contrary, he was told, the youngsters wanted to show him that they had learned to write their own names.
    Soon after, Kirk Douglas showed what he had learned, signing his name for fans here - in Hebrew.
    A young American politician named John F. Kennedy was here in 1951; his friend Marilyn Monroe didn't visit, but almost as fulfilling, we read that Egypt banned her films as a "danger to security." We knew the real reason: she had converted to Judaism. Another security risk was Satchmo, trumpeter Louis Armstrong, branded by a Cairo newspaper as an "Israeli spy." Harry Belafonte cracked jokes in Hebrew and Yiddish; Frank Sinatra swaggered in; the Beatles wanted to play here in 1964 but - egads - they were barred; Italian defense minister Giovanni Spadolini arrived and declared he was "proud to be a Zionist." We hosted Zubin Mehta, Mandy Rice Davies, Gregory Peck and, ultimately, Anwar Sadat.
    Another popular theme - and not only in the last couple of years - is Israel-bashing. We've been snubbed at a British royal banquet, again at a British royal wedding; Tass called the Entebbe rescue "piracy" by Israel; Germany's Stern magazine ran an outrageously unfair series in 1973; the Concise Oxford Dictionary admitted it changed Israel-related entries to appease an Arab-lobby group; the Encyclopedia Britannica's 1985 yearbook described Jerusalem as "capital of the Al-Quds region of Jordan"; British cartographers removed all references to Israel on maps sent to Arab countries; a British bank had a policy of endorsing checks marked "valid in all countries of the world except Israel"; China canceled an American art exhibit because it included a portrait of Golda Meir.
The British press roundly rejected pro-Israel photos of the Lebanon war, explaining that the photographer was biased toward Israel; the BBC aired a TV play that was virulently antisemitic and anti-Israel; an Israeli swimmer, in a live London interview, corrected the BBC's terminology, saying, "it's not Palestine; it's Israel now"; the BBC quoted only the PLO's version of a 1983 terrorist attack; the BBC accepted a Syrian army spokesman's account of the Yom Kippur War over an entirely different version filed by the network's own correspondent; the BBC was criticized - by their own reporters - for biased anti-Israel reporting. The question is: has The Jerusalem Post been picking on the British, or are the British really that perverted?
    Zipping through daily history can distort reality. You would think that Israeli mothers bear only triplets, quads and quints, because only they get reported. Tourists, if they're not famous, get raped (we don't report on visitors successfully acquiring a suntan). You would think we are a giant on the world stage: we have the most doctors per capita, the most lawyers, we grew the largest egg, the biggest pumpkin, our airport is the world's safest and El Al one of Mankind's preferred five airlines.
    No nation on Earth consumes chicken like us, we once had the world's most beautiful woman (Rina Mor, Miss Universe of 1976) and the world's second most beautiful nude woman (Bracha Sharabi, 1978 Miss Nude World runner-up); Maccabi Tel Aviv was rated the fifth-best sports team in the world in 1978; Israel is the world's best lab for studying stress, we are the second-worst diplomatic parking violators in New York.
    When we rank 147th in the world in something, the newspapers aren't interested.
    Anyone who has been in the news business for 40 years - as I was for most of a year - can be excused for being a tad jaded. No extremity of oddness seems more than a trifle unusual; no story is unbelievable; no twist of fate at all unexpected. In truth, there was only one single story that seemed beyond belief, a story unique in this newspaper's history. In one paragraph in 1953, the Foreign Ministry announced that it was suspending its weekly press conferences because, the spokesman said, the ministry had nothing to say. No news? Now that's news!